American Legislative Exchange Council – ALEC
National Right to Work – NRTW
US Chamber of Commerce
Heritage Foundation
Tea Party
Associated Builders & Contractors, Inc – ABC
All of these groups listed above and others, have to be fed money, big money. This isn’t chump change like the anti-union lawyers and consultants.
The above groups, and others – are the anti-union, anti-worker entities that put the strategic policies of the Big Boys such as Construction Users Round Table (CURT) and the National Manufacturers Association (NMA) into action.
CURT, NMA et al, have extensive networks that work at the state and community level to promote their agendas working with and funding the above groups. For CURT it is their Local Construction Users Group. They legally buy, (lobby) national, state and local politian’s with the money they can provide.
Since an entity like CURT works 7 days a week to bring about the demise of organized labor as we know it and in every concrete way – why is it that we feel they want to collaborate with us? Our skills certainly, especially because the building trades market share has collapsed faster than their own predictions indicated. So yes, in the very short term they will be our buddies. They also will pull us in very tight for this next round of infrastructure, and when this new generation of smart facilities are built – we will be shown the final door.
Right now and increasingly on many jobs, the building trades are relegated to now work alongside the non/anti-union contractors and are threatened that if we don’t shut up, we won’t even get those jobs. The non/anti-union companies do the majority of hours of construction. And then purely as a business decision and on a lot of jobs the skilled trades come in to fix the problems, kind of like a “punch list”.
If the Building Trades allow a bully to continue to take their lunch money, then they shouldn’t be surprised when the bully takes it all!
Danny L Caliendo
Organizer
Labor Rising Group
